Jimmy Hoffa was murdered on July 30,1975 in a conspiracy that included a pair of Detroit Mafia brothers and the then-president of the Teamsters Union, Frank Fitzsimmons, according to the labor leader’s son, James P. Hoffa.
“They had it set up to murder him, and they did,” Hoffa said..
“They actually got together to kill him because they couldn’t stop him any other way. He was an unstoppable force,” Hoffa said about his legendary father, who was preparing to run for the presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters against Fitzsimmons in 1976.
“Fitzsimmons was afraid that Hoffa was coming back and he says, ‘I want this job. I want to keep this job.’ And the mob didn’t want him back, and I think they got together. They’d say, ‘How do we make sure he doesn’t come back?’ because they were afraid. They knew if he did come back, he would win the election and he would take back the union. They knew that, and the only way to stop him was to kill him.”
The stunning revelations from the younger Hoffa, a former Teamsters president himself, are aired in an exclusive Fox Nation interview. Hoffa opened up about his father’s disappearance for the last two episodes of the streaming series “Riddle, The Search for James R. Hoffa.”
“It was just devastating to my family, to my sister,” Hoffa said. “My father was everything, and my mother died five years later of a broken heart. She never got over it.”
“We don’t have closure because we don’t have a grave. And it’s amazing what that means to people,” he continued. “We are left with the love of him, but what else do you have? We have a hole in our heart.”
“My father is gone, and he was a great man, and that’s the great loss to my family and to the union.”
Hoffa told Fox Nation that Fitzsimmons, who died of lung cancer in 1981 at the age of 73, was a member of the conspiracy that was hatched by the Detroit mob crime family to get rid of his father. He said the assassination plan was carried out by Mafia capos Anthony Giacalone, known as “Tony Jack,” and his capo brother Vito Giacalone, known as “Billy Jack.”
“He was pushing very hard against powerful people in the union and obviously in the mob,” he said. “They realized the only way to stop him was to kill him.”
Fox Nation has also learned about a new claim from a Detroit mobster who told the FBI he witnessed Hoffa’s murder and named Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone as the killer. The informant said he would refuse to testify and would deny he admitted it if ever confronted, according to the claim.
Another new accusation comes from former Detroit mobster Nove Tocco, who said that “Tony Jack” Giacalone told him that Hoffa was killed by another mobster, Anthony Palazzolo, known as “Tony Pal,” according to Detroit mob reporter Scott Burnstein, who runs the website “Gangster Report.”
The FBI would not confirm the claims. Palazzolo’s family refused to comment to Fox Nation and Vito “Billy Jack” Giaclone’s son, 74- year old Jackie Giacalone, who has been publicly listed as the reputed current head of the Detroit mob, previously told Fox Nation that he has no idea what happened to Hoffa.
James P. Hoffa said he would not be surprised if Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone was the hitman who murdered his father. He said he is unfamiliar with Palazzolo.
Hoffa was last seen in the parking lot of the Bloomfield Hills, Mich., restaurant, the Machus Red Fox, at about 2:30 pm on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 30, 1975. He thought that he was on his way to a meeting arranged by Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone, to make peace with Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a powerful Teamsters local president in New Jersey and capo in the New York-based Genovese crime family. “Tony Pro” had for years been a bitter union enemy and Hoffa needed his support against Fitzsimmons in the upcoming Teamsters election.
Six witnesses saw Hoffa as he waited to be picked up in the 92-degree heat. He was then seen climbing into a maroon Mercury sedan and vanished. In 2001, the FBI announced that DNA from a strand of hair found on the right rear seat of that car matched Hoffa.
Hoffa’s son believes that Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone picked up his father in the car and told his Dad that his brother Anthony and “Tony Pro” Provenzano were waiting for him elsewhere for the meeting.
Observers think Anthony “Tony Pal” Palazzolo, was also in the car and, along with Vito “Billy Jack” Giacalone, served as the Mafia’s hit team. They drove Hoffa to a secure location where he would have felt comfortable and safe for the sit-down, and then killed him.
Hoffa, in the months before he vanished, had started speaking out against the growing Mafia influence in the union and attacked Fitzsimmons as a tool of organized crime. He blamed Fitzsimmons for turning over the billion-dollar Teamsters Central States Pension Fund, that helped in part to build Las Vegas, to various mob crime families.
Hoffa, in his railing against Fitzsimmons and the Mafia, accused Fitzsimmons of “selling out to mobsters” and buying a mansion at California’s Las Costa Country Club with union money.
He also vowed to get rid of the Teamsters’ Mafia loans and kick the mob out of the union.
“Ever since Fitzsimmons took over the underworld holds the balance of power in the Teamsters,” Hoffa declared. “Well, mobsters be damned!”
“The mob didn’t want him back. Fitzsimmons didn’t want him back. They had it good under Fitzsimmons. They were getting pension fund loans. They were doing everything else, and my father knew about it. He wanted to straighten the union out,” said Hoffa’s son James.
But he knew his father was playing with his life.
An FBI report said that James “stated that he always feared for the life of his father. However, this fear was at its greatest in July 1975…he expressed a fear for his father’s life. Hoffa stated that his father told him there was nothing to fear.”
Hoffa said his warnings to his father went unheeded.
“I told him, ‘I think you are in danger,’ and he never acknowledged that. He’s just one of those persons that wanted to bull on. That’s the way he was. That was his nature,” he said. “I was worried about him. He was pushing very hard on some powerful people in the union and obviously some people in the mob.”
JIMMY HOFFA MAY BE BURIED AT SITE OF DEMOLISHED MLB STADIUM: COLD CASE GROUP
Jimmy Hoffa gave his last interview to Detroit investigative reporter Jerry Stanecki, a few weeks before he vanished:
Hoffa: “What the hell people doing to try and kill me for? “
Stanecki: “To get you out of the way.”
Hoffa: “That’s nonsense. Out of the way for what?”
Stanecki: “You don’t think somebody is going to try to have you killed?”
Hoffa: “Hell no…. hell no.”
When Stanecki asked Hoffa if Fitzsimmons “would go so far to eliminate you,” Hoffa replied that Fitzsimmons “hasn’t got the guts.”
But Hoffa’s son said that’s exactly what Fitzsimmons did.
“Fitzsimmons was the worst man in the world,” he says.
There were multiple meetings over a six-month period before Hoffa disappeared where he sat down with the Giacalone brothers as they tried to convince Hoffa to settle his differences with Provenzano. Hoffa’s son said the purpose of the meetings was just a pretense to get Hoffa alone to murder him.
“These guys are gangsters. They looked like gangsters and they acted like gangsters,” he says. Hoffa said he told his father, ‘Those people are bad, don’t have anything to do with them.’ He added, ‘They were just conning my Dad.”
James and his father met with the Giacalone brothers in James’s downtown Detroit law office on May 15, 1975. James said they pressured his Dad to meet with “Tony Pro.”
The Giacalones again sat down with Hoffa at his lake house on Lake Orion on July 12.
The final meeting occurred on Sunday July 27, three days before Hoffa vanished. At that meeting, Hoffa and “Tony Jack” were sitting at a picnic table on the side of the lake house when James arrived and approached them.
“I walked up and my Dad said, ‘Get lost, go away,’ we’re talking,” James recalled. He did not like what he saw and did not want his father to deal with the likes of the Giacalones.
“It was too perilous trying to come back with the elements that he was dealing with, and I said, ‘It’s not worth it to try and come back, Dad, you’ve got it all. You’ve got your pension, you’ve got a beautiful family. You’ve got grandkids. Raise the grandkids, enjoy your life. You’ve worked hard all your life.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m coming back’.”
Three days later, at 1:15 in the afternoon of July 30, Hoffa kissed his wife Josephine goodbye at the kitchen door, drove down his driveway, made a right to head to the highway to the Machus Red Fox restaurant to meet up with “Tony Jack.” He never came back.
Hoffa’s son puts the blame directly on the feared capo, “Tony Jack,” Anthony Giacalone.
“Giacalone had him killed. He didn’t kill him, but he was part of the plot.”
In 1978, three years after Hoffa vanished, corroboration that “Tony Jack” was behind the disappearance came in a court filing about then-Teamsters president Jackie Presser. He had long been an FBI informant and Presser told the bureau that “Tony Jack” needed $250,000 and he put the squeeze on Fitzsimmons to get it.
“Presser stated that Giacalone had advised Fitzsimmons that he had Hoffa killed, and that since he had taken care of Fitzsimmons’ arch rival, it was proper for Fitzsimmons to pay him.”
James Hoffa said he called Giacalone a few days after his father disappeared to find out if he knew anything.
He said “Tony Jack” told him that he never had a meeting with his father, and when Hoffa asked what happened to his dad, “Tony Jack” replied, “Maybe he’s on vacation.”
“What an answer,” says James. “A smart-ass answer from Tony Giacalone. I thought exactly what I thought, that he had something to do with his disappearance.”
EXCLUSIVE: THE LAST LIVING JIMMY HOFFA SUSPECT’S SHOCKING CLAIM
Through the years, there have been various claims about where Hoffa was killed.
One possibility was a local catering hall called the Raleigh House, which the FBI investigated and found no evidence tying it to the disappearance. Another location seems more likely, a mansion on a secluded knoll in Bloomfield Hills. The home was owned at the time by Detroit mob solider Carlo Licata, who was found shot to death on his bed in the house on July 30, 1981…exactly six years to the day from when Hoffa had vanished.
“I believe his death was a retaliation for what he knew about Jimmy Hoffa’s murder,” said Licata’s cousin, Anne Licata-Solaas. “He was going to expose it.”
Licata-Solaas has written a book about her family, “The Scent of Lemons,” that lays out the scenario that Carlo was murdered to keep him quiet about what happened to Hoffa.
Authorities ruled Licata’s death a “suicide,” and determined that Licata died instantly from a bullet to his heart. But Licata-Solaas doesn’t buy it. The gun was found seven feet from Licata’s body, resting neatly on his dresser chest of drawers.
Fox Nation asked renowned Medical Examiner Dr. Michael Baden to review Licata’s autopsy and police report. He doesn’t think Licata killed himself either.
“The forensic evidence is that this is a homicide, not a suicide,” said Baden. “Someone else did this.”
Baden cites, among other reasons, that the gun was held a few inches away from Licata’s body, there was no gunpowder residue on his hands which would have been left by a .357 magnum, and Licata would not have been able to die and then stand up to place the gun on the far side of the room and then lie down again.
Investigators say Licata’s house was the logical place to kill Jimmy Hoffa. It had a secluded garage that was hidden from the street, so the car with Hoffa could have pulled in without being noticed.
“It makes sense from the standpoint that it was probably the closest place they could take him and still have him believe that, okay, nothing bad was going to happen,” former FBI agent Mike Cerone told Fox Nation.
Carlo Licata’s sons declined to comment.
Over the years there have been claims that Hoffa was buried in the New Jersey Meadowlands, in various fields and under driveways in Michigan, under the massive Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit and under a baseball field in Wisconsin.
The FBI last dug in 2022 under the Pulaski Skyway in Jersey City, N.J., at the site of an old mob-connected waste site, known as Moscato’s dump. It was claimed that Hoffa was buried there in a barrel. The search came up empty.
“The answer is incredibly simple. Jimmy Hoffa never left Detroit,” said Burnstein. “This was something that probably happened in a 30 to 60-minute window on the afternoon of July 30, 1975. It happened in probably a 15-mile radius of where he was murdered.”
IT IS TIME FOR THE FBI TO TELL US WHO KILLED JIMMY HOFFA
“I believe Jimmy Hoffa was part of the ozone layer within 90 minutes of disappearing,” said Vince Wade, a veteran Detroit television reporter who broke the story of Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. “I believe the body was totally destroyed.”
The preponderance of the evidence points to the waste facility, Central Sanitation Services in Hamtramck, Mich., a short drive over the Detroit city line, as the place where Hoffa’s body was taken.
“It was run by the Mob, so they could control who was around and who wasn’t around. If you don’t have a body, you don’t have evidence. And if you don’t have evidence, you don’t have a case,” said Wade.
“It had those huge compactors which would crush tons of cardboard into miniscule pieces of cardboard, said Keith Corbett, the former head of the Justice Department Organized Crime Strike Force in Detroit. “That would have been the perfect place.”
David Tubman, who has researched the case extensively and written the book “Jimmy Hoffa Is Missing, -The Gap,” said a witness who worked at Central Sanitation in July, 1975, including the day Hoffa vanished, told him that Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone visited the facility shortly before Hoffa went missing.
“‘Tony Jack” came in and was walking around calmly, casually, studying the equipment and walking around it for 45 minutes to an hour,” said Tubman. He believes the mob capo was there to inspect where Hoffa’s body was going to go.
And on the evening of July 30, the day Hoffa disappeared, Burnstein said that mobster Anthony “Tony Pal” Palazzolo was also seen at the facility.
“’Tony Pal’ showed up at Central Sanitation in the hours after Hoffa had vanished and basically cleared the place out,” he said.
In addition, Tubman says the employee who operated the massive bundler machine that could have crushed Hoffa’s remains was replaced that afternoon…by a mobster.
“That process would have definitely destroyed any trace of a human body,” he said.
“It was planned, it was programmed, there was a process from the beginning to the end, and when I mean the end, I mean the destruction of the body,” said Richard Convertino, a former federal prosecutor in Detroit, who prosecuted Anthony “Tony Pal” Palazzolo in another case.
“Tony Pal” was caught on tape years later by an undercover agent boasting that he ran Hoffa’s body through a massive sausage auger in a Detroit meat processing company.
“He said, ‘That’s where I put Jimmy,” said Convertino.
After “Tony Pal” put Hoffa’s body through the auger, the remains were taken to Central Sanitation for disposal, said Burnstein.
The FBI said there was probable cause that Central Sanitation was where Hoffa’s body was destroyed.
Central Sanitation has long been out of business. Seven months after Hoffa disappeared, a fire destroyed the building. It was caused by arson.
The Hoffa case is still active in the Detroit office of the FBI and has a special agent assigned to it.
“The Bureau does take it seriously. It’s still an active investigation,” said Christopher J. Hess, an assistant special agent in charge of the office.
“We continue to follow leads, seek information from the public and make every effort to further the investigation.
“It’s always my hope that any case that we investigate gets solved and justice is served,” Hess told Fox Nation.
“Certainly in this case, we recognize the historical significance of the case, but more importantly there is a family member and family who still mourns the loss of their family member, in this case Mr. Hoffa, so we hope for information that leads us to the evidence that we need to solve this case.”
“I hope it is solved in my lifetime,” he said.
Even though Hoffa vanished half a century ago, his work continues through the James R. Hoffa Memorial Scholarship Fund, which distributes about $1.4 million a year in scholarship money to the daughters and sons of Teamsters members for their education.
“It’s basically a tribute to what his ideals were and the fact that it helps kids,” said James Hoffa. “It’s part of his legacy… it keeps his memory alive.”
He hopes that his father will not be remembered for what happened to him, but for what he accomplished at the bargaining table and on the picket line over the decades for American workers. Hoffa secured the employee benefits that so many take for granted today, such as higher wages, overtime, increased pensions and health care coverage, he said.
“That’s the memory we want of people, not how he disappeared. You know, one of the things people say sometimes is, it’s not how you died, but now you lived. And you know what? Jimmy Hoffa can look back on that and say, he lived right.”
“We miss him.”
Although no one has been convicted of the Hoffa killing, the Hoffa family wants the truth out, and they say that points to the Detroit Mafia and the Giacalone brothers working with then-Teamsters president Fitzsimmons as those who were responsible.
Watch all eight episodes of “Riddle, The Search for James R. Hoffa,” streaming on Fox Nation. The final episodes with James P. Hoffa debut on July 30.
